(21 October, 2000)
Sorry it's been so long; I was in China for much of September, got sick as soon as I got back, and have been running around like a chicken ever since. (Hey, beats running around like a Cassowary.)
I've been trying to write up my China trip, which was a Tea Tour and was absolutely amazing, but I'm not getting very far. I'll keep after it as well as I can, but I ain't promising anything.
On other fronts, however, I am making a bit of headway and can report on it in my usual haphazard manner.
(21 October, 2000)
I now have a plinth built, and I have tested the burner, which sorta works. (Whoever drilled the orifice was from Cincinnati. [sorry, wretched antique vaudeville joke, which we won't go into here; the reference is in memory of my grandma, who was into that sorta humor.]) Suffice it to say that the flame emerges from the burner at an angle because the orifice is drilled wrong. I will acquire a new orifice when I can. In the meanwhile, however, the burner is probably usable.
This means that I'm almost ready to build the kiln, which will be my first and will probably teach me the things I need to know in order to build one that will work. (Sigh.)
(22 October, 2000)
I have now coated the burner with ITC 213, a proprietary high-emissivity material that is designed to protect metals at pottery temperatures. I hope the coating remains in place when I bring the burner up to temp; I've heard some reports of spalling from electric kiln elements.
This morning, on the way to the pottery, I came up with something that is close to a final design. I then trimmed several objects, noticed that the small platters were starting to warp & that the large platter was irretrievably potato-chipped, though fortunately not terribly badly, put the small platters face-down on batts so they'll dry as flat as may be, and realized that I really need a kiln in order to make some of the parts of the flue for the kiln.
Uhhh, hmmm.
Well, scratch the "final design" for now -- I have decided to make a modest updraft kiln, which doesn't require a fancy flue, as a practice object. It should reach cone 11 if I don't make it too huge, and I should be able to produce in it the high-temperature flue parts for the next kiln. I think I've got a design, and I have started dragging out the relevant pieces of insulating board, only to discover that I can't find my measuring tape. If it ain't one damn thing, it's another.
In any case, whenever I get past this obstacle, I will start hacking out & assembling pieces; when I have all the pieces, I'll build the thing, spray ITC 100 all over the inside of it, and fire it once to drive off any volatiles that may emerge from the ITC coating or the insulating board. If that works, I'll soon be ready to do a _real_ firing, though I guess I've got a certain amount of glazing to do before I'll have enough pots to fill even a 5-cubic-foot volume.
<21 October, 2000)
I've been working up some glazes, mostly derived from the recipes at the back of Nigel Wood's excellent "Chinese Glazes", which I'm pretty sure I've already mentioned here; thus far, it looks like I'll get a very decent pale celadon and a nice Kaki. (Wood includes the one Japanese glaze partly as a comparison and partly because it is rather similar to several of the Chinese glazes that the book is primarily about.) Kaki, by the way, is the Japanese name for what we call a persimmon in English; but the inside of a Japanese persimmon is a rich brown color, not the bright pumpkin orange of our common supermarket persimmons, and so is the glaze. When I have a chance, I'll put up photos on the glazeworks page.
My throwing seems to have moved through another plateau, and I now seem to be able to do platters. I'm not going to trouble you with too many stupid pictures of greenware here (enough is, after all, enough), but I do like the shape of this bowl, so here 'tis, as an example of stuff that I find aesthetically pleasing:
The bowl is about six inches across. It will, of course, be smaller when it's finished, if it survives the rest of the process.
(25 October, 2000)
Yesterday I bought 100 pounds of B-Mix, a white stoneware that isn't grogged, which means that it is rather smooth, but slightly easier to throw than most porcelains. (We won't get into how weird B-Mix is here, but I have the recipe if anyone is interested.)
Some people love B-Mix, some hate it. I tend to get along with it pretty well, and it lends itself to certain kinds of things. For example, as long as we're talking about bowl shapes I like, here's another one, closely related to the one above:
This was actually too soft to trim when I got to the pottery today, and the foot you see (which is only the outside -- I didn't dare cut into the bottom of the bowl, as I would have had to do in order to finish making the footring) took me about 30 minutes to develop. It's okay, but I'm letting the bowl dry out a bit more before I make any attempt at completing it. Fate has already been tempted sufficiently.
(back to 24 October, 2000)
I've noticed another peculiar thing: I seem to throw a lot better if someone is watching. Maybe I'm more careful about what I'm doing, I don't know; whatever it is, I have done my two best platters as demos for other students at Glen Echo who wanted to see how to throw them. I use a method I learned from Drew Daly, at Seward Park Art Studio, in Seattle. (If you care, send an email msg & ask.)
(27 November, 2000)
I'm now in Seattle, in the middle of getting my stuff together and getting it all to the east coast. This is both a pain and a relief, no surprise. (I find people with univalent feelings incomprehensible.)
On my way up here from Watsonville, I managed to re-acquire a rose that I had originally collected in Comptche, California, probably in 1992, and lost in 1996; the owners probably think I'm kinda wacko, but they were very kind, and helped me chop a cane off their bush in the dark. This rose may be 'Paul Ricault', and I got it in Comptche, so I'm tentatively calling it "CPR". Of course, the fact that it's growing at the doctor's house has nothing to do with it.
The plant has dense green foliage and cupped magenta blooms with lots of petals and a rich fragrance. Before the buds open, the sepals extend well past the ends of the petals, probably a diagnostic character. It clearly isn't one of the Gallica roses (Gallica foliage has a peculiar "clawed" look to it, which makes Gallicas easy to spot), and it's too dark to be an Alba (see 'Königin von Dänemark' for the darkest of those); I don't think it's a damask, either. Take a look at Paul Barden's page on 'Paul Ricault' to get an idea of what "CPR" is like. (I think the sepals on "CPR" are even longer and fancier than the ones on 'Paul Ricault', which troubles me.) Barden also has fine photos of a number of other roses, if you're interested. He appears to have typed in haste and not checked his spelling, but hey.
One sidelight on this -- Barden notes that this rose is supposed to repeat in the fall, but his has failed to do so. There may be two clones running around, because one of the heritage roses folks in the Seattle area has or had one 'Paul Ricault' that rebloomed and another that didn't. So go figure.
(29 November, 2000)
I got into the car yesterday, and drove back out past Ellensburg to the bridge across the Columbia. I may have mentioned, after I drove across last spring, searching for a rose with beautifully fragrant heps out there, and failing to find it. In fact, I failed to find any roses at all at that time.
This time was even worse. I went out, found what looked like it was probably the correct spot, and it was choked with roses -- there must have been dozens of bushes... all wrong. I went around and around, looking at various places in the area, and found lots more, all of the same type. Everywhere there was water, there were roses, or nearly so. I did succeed in gathering some heps, but they aren't fragrant, and are the wrong shape.
Fortunately, I had stopped just shy of mile 119 on my way out, at the first roses I actually saw, which were also wrong but at least had heps of roughly the correct shape (though not the correct size -- these are much larger than the ones I collected on or about October 28th, 1992) and have a pleasant fragrance. It may even be a tenth or a twentieth as strong as what I was looking for... argh.
At least I had a nice drive and several nifty walks amid the sagebrush and brambles. Probably the last time it will be possible without chains this year, too -- they'd cleared the pass, and it hadn't had a chance to snow itself shut again yet.
(27 November, 2000)
When I fired the prototype kiln, shortly before I took
off for the west coast, it got to 950 celsius and
stalled. There were clear indications of leaky seams. I
disassembled it the next day, and the outer box, which
was made of low-density low-temp fiberboard, fell
apart.
Cynbe Ru Taren
later suggested that instead of making
the setback cuts in a single thickness of the high-temp
board, I might want to use two thicknesses, and that
does seem to be The Right Way To Go; when I get back,
I'll probably rebuild on that basis, unless someone
hands me large quantities of appropriate firebrick. I've
already committed a redesign, which uses two thicknesses
of the high-temp board and one of higher-density (read,
"much stronger") low-temp board; I'm also considering
the possibility of a thin layer of fiber blanket between
them to restrict the passage of any flame that actually
manages to escape from the inner box. We Shall See.
Pseudo-mailto: jon [at] bazilians [put it here] org
Last modified: Mon Jan 29 20:18:50 PST 2001